Thursday, September 01, 2016

Normalizing banana republic politics

by digby

This little "joke" was just casually dropped into Trump's speech last night:

“Within ICE, I am going to create a new special deportation task force focused on identifying and quickly removing the most dangerous criminal illegal immigrants in America who have evaded justice just like Hillary Clinton has evaded justice, okay? Maybe they’ll be able to deport her.”

Big laughs all around I'm sure. But this relentless pounding by a presidential candidate about Clinton for being some sort of criminal is really unprecedented. We've certainly heard such things from protesters and pundits over the years. But I've never heard a candidate say it or suggest to his followers that he would jail his opponent if he wins.

I hear from people on both the right and the left daily who think Hillary Clinton should be jailed and potentially given the death penalty for a variety of crimes. She is loathed like no politician I've ever seen despite the fact that she's actually a garden variety mainstream Democrat no worse than Obama, Kerry, Gore, Dean etc. But I still think there's something uniquely horrifying about the GOP presidential candidate saying these things. It gives it a veneer of official policy of one of our two major parties and that's just ... bad. There are people out there who might very well get the wrong idea, especially since Trump is running as vigilante in chief.